Repeat... Repeat... Repeat...

My husband kills movies for me.  He gets on a kick and watches the same movie over and over and over.  Not like he pulls it out every year and watches it.  Every night for ten days straight he will watch the same movie and fall asleep five minutes in.  Then the next night he picks it up five minutes in and falls asleep after 5 minutes.  So you can imagine how long it takes to actually get through the movie.  There is a long list of movies that I now can't stand.



This movie is now dead to me

 

What possibly annoys me the most is that I do it too.  But on a much less obnoxious to the people around me way.  I will read and re-read and re-read the same scenes in a book.  The cave scene in Hunger Games... I have read it so many times I probably have it memorized.

This ends up creeping into my writing as well.  I think that over the past 10 years I have accumulated at least 10 stories that I have created.  They occasionally make an appearance and I run through the same couple of scenes.  Those pivotal scenes that make you feel the goose bumps.  So the rest of the story is formed around these scenes, but they are what keep me up at night playing them on a continuous loop until I finally pass out.  Sometimes I write them out first because they set the tone for everything else.  But for this last final scene, I am just banging my head against a wall.

I know I have four chapters left, and the next two chapters are that scene.  I have played it out different ways, different words, different positions in the room.  It's driving me crazy.  I have written and crossed out and re-written the words so many times.  And with the other chapters I can let it go, I'll fix it on revision.  But this is it.  It's that scene.  And I want it to be just right.  So I'm putting down the laptop and going to bed.  Once my head hits that pillow, it will all come to me and it will be beautiful and I will see it in Technicolor.  I just hope that when I wake up I remember how to put it into words.